We confess, however, that these feasts do not present sunny pictures exclusively; there are many who, as we have hinted, crown them with boisterous merriment. It was an ancient custom to elect, on the morning after the feast, a _Mayor_, or _Lord of the Festival_, whose word was law, and who was the sovereign dispenser of fun and frolic, and against whose command there was no appeal. The farce of "_The Mayor of Garret_" furnishes a correct example of this species of rustic revelry. We are not yet very old; but are old enough to remember the time when the mayor, or lord of the festivities referred to, was chosen in accordance with the words of Burns-- "Wha first beside his chair shall fa', Let him be king among us a'!" But it is long since the treatment of a master of the revels ceased even to be decent--we would say merciful. In most places he is no longer paraded as an absolute monarch upon the shoulders of his subjects, but as the slave of the multitude, of whom they delight to make pastime. The mayor of the village feast, "has fallen from his high estate," of dictating imperious commands for his short hour of power; and now he is generally placed in the condition of the frog in the fable, and what may be sport to his tormentors, is well-nigh death to him. The festival from which our present story takes its rise was held in Tweedmouth (the southern suburb of Berwick), nearly seventy years ago; and, according to custom, on Margaret's day, or the following Monday. For, although most of them are in some degree held upon the Sunday (a celebration which would "be more honoured in the breach than in the observance"), Monday may always be considered as the chief day of the feast. Now at that period there resided at Tweedmouth a Mrs Mordington, the widow of the commander of a coasting sloop, who had left her with two children, a son and daughter. The son, at the period our tale begins, was about one-and-twenty; his sister, two years younger. The son's name was George, and he was then a clerk in the office of a merchant in Gateshead. At the feast of St Margaret's, therefore--which is commemorated in Tweedmouth in July, when the sun is in the plenitude of its strength, and when the very birds, oppressed with its heat, leave the thin air and the upper branches, and, folding their wings, sit silently in the umbrageous shades, enjoying, well pleased, the coolness of their leafy shelter--George Mordington returned to Tweedside, to see his mother and his sister; yea, and there was another whom he longed not less eagerly to behold, and that was Marion Weatherly, a fair-headed maiden of nineteen, and the daughter of a master fisherman, who had the lease of some two hundred yards upon the Tweed, somewhere between where the Whitadder joins it and the bridge; but whether on the south or north side I cannot tell. As there may be thousands of the readers of these tales unacquainted with the nature of salmon fisheries, or of what is